Busy hands | Disquiet mind

The Electro-Sewing Workshop was last Friday, and I feel it went very well. Even with starting on Irish-Standard-Time and forcing the class to sit through a slide-deck, there were seven very pretty LED-flowers two-and-a-half hours later. Definitely a success!

Here's a couple of pics from the night.



Aren't they pretty! I am planning to write up a how-to for these, but truth be known, they follow essentially the same method as for the LED-horns from last year. Nonetheless, people seemed rather enthused about the whole experience :)

I've also gotten my hands on the new LilyPad ProtoSnap Development Board. It's very nifty; all the main components of the LilyPad range, pre-connected on one board! So you can practice your programming, or simply getting the components to work together the way you want, without having to worry about any of that sewing malarkey. Then, if you want, you can snap the pieces apart and sew them into an actual project!

I plugged it in just yesterday and was highly amused to find a pre-loaded program that tests most of the components (make sure to play with the switches!). But, looking closely, I've noticed that only the RGB-LED, the five white LEDs, and the momentary push-button are connected to actual sew-holes on the Simple Microcontroller Board. The rest of them are connected through paths that would be available on the full Microcontroller Board, but that aren't exposed on the Simple board. Makes sense, seeing as how the LEDs/button take up all the existing holes! (Still, I imagine the numbers printed on next to the other components could get confusing for someone just starting out. Speaking of, there's a nice tutorial available to get you up and running.)

And all this has inspired me to maybe run a LilyPad course in tog in January. We'll see.


In other news, I don't have any photos from Octocon, but we made the same flowers as shown above, and you can check out the photos from Darklight (where I spent some time teaching people to solder) in the Gallery. (Can you spot me, or rather my Dresden Dolls hoodie?) That's almost it for my busy October. *phew*

Someone asked me for this and I realised I'd never posted it. (I had dealt with reading the temp here but not the rest of it.) It's not fully done. The timing and lights and such could still do with some tweaking, but I guess that comes down to personalisation. If you'd like to try this project the physical construction is here, and what follows is my code. If you do give it a go I'd love to see how it turns out!

( code monkey like you )

The LilyPad range includes a temperature sensor, which is a MCP9700 thermistor type sensor, used for measuring ambient temperatures. It has positive and negative power terminals, and a 's' terminal that you connect to an analogue pin on the LilyPad microcontroller. You set up the code in the same way as for other sensors, and read the value:

( Code )

This does give a seemingly accurate reading (oddly enough I seem to lack any other kind of ambient thermometer), except that it fluctuates quite a bit. But in and around what seems like a decent value. I may have to do some form of averaging to smooth it out.

I was using the new Simple Board, so thought I'd see if there was any difference using the Main Board. There's not, exact same results. So my only other thought is that maybe the USB-power is fluctuating and skewing the results. Of course, I don't have a ready way of reading the values while it's solely on battery power, so I can't check. Interesting though. I wonder if anyone has seen this before?

Remember part 1, with the 3x3 LED matrix? That was practice, for this, a 7x7 matrix, on a functional, wearable, piece of clothing.

( Lots of text, pictures, and a couple of videos. )

My Lilypad is now aware! It actually does something in response to changes it detects! I can't take the glory, I simply used the code from the project that inspired mine: Leah Buechley's accelerometer shirt.

Interesting things about this code:
( Code talk... )

The Result:
( Short video... )

Also, there is a newer version of the Arduino IDE available, 17, that fixes the bug I mentioned in a previous post about how the Lilypad was using the wrong baud rate to communicate back to the computer. So now if you set it at 9600, it actually uses 9600. This makes me happy.

Next step? Using data from the 3-axes!